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Wednesday, October 26, 2016

LP Review: "Hairy Mountain" by Datura4

Recently, a music industry friend of mine and I were talking about the state of music in the world.

Many times, I've railed against paint by numbers music, because it's boring and repetitive, but my buddy said that sometimes repetitive is good.

A great example of good repetitiveness is 12 Bar Blues.

With just three chords and about 12 lines of lyrics, a guitarist and singer of questionable abilities can write at least 17,982 songs. On stage Billy Gibbons made reference to that when he said, same three guys, same three chords.

But, of course there's far more to a quality 12 bar blues tune than just the I-III-IV progression and the turn around chords. It's the story, the emotion, the feeling, and the kick ass guitar solos!

Datura4

What many people now call Arena Rock used to be considered blues based rock.

Led Zeppelin were the masters of taking old blues standards and whipping them up into something larger than life.

(Yes I know and I'm not getting into it.)

ZZ Top also were a big fan of the blues.

Looking back though, most bands of that era didn't play blues based rock, or blues based anything.

Which is why some folks have a hard time getting into legitimate blues, because it's so much smaller. Datura4 though stand at the middle of the bridge between Rock and the Blues.

Though, their tasty, tasty guitar solos are rock, they're based in the blues, especially the slide guitar licks....wow. The verses are straight twelve bar blues, with some Kiss-like hooks thrown in for good measure.

Don't look for a charismatic frontman putting it all out there, because he's not here. The vocals are a more droning version of Cream and that suits the tunes perfectly.

Datura4 has learned the first lesson of blues rock, if you've got a killer guitar tone, you've already taken the high ground. Building off some impeccable (and traditional) chord progressions, Datura4 is able take on all comers with a scorcher of a record.